The Renovation - Kenan Orhan

The Booker really does love a migrant novel. It has an excellent track record of recognising writers in diaspora, and it particularly seems to gravitate towards books about grieving a homeland, or a culture, that still exists but that you can no longer go back to. This sits very firmly within that tradition. It's a very Booker Prize book. I know the committee likes to insist you can never spot a Booker book until it's already been longlisted, but this is one of those cases where, if you'd handed it to me five months ago with no context at all, I'd have told you it had Booker longlist written all over it. I really liked this one. It's surreal and slippery in the way it moves, but it never loses its grip on real, grounded human emotion, on the complexity of grief and pain and suffering. What I appreciated most is that it understands something true, which is that even in the middle of pain, even when everything is bad, people still find the humour in it. There's a lot of very subtle,…